He also invited Hungarian-born psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi pronounced cheeks sent me high , best known for exploring a happy state of mind called flow, the feeling of complete engagement in a creative or playful activity familiar to athletes, musicians, video-game enthusiasts — almost anyone who loses himself in a favorite pursuit. By the end of their week at the beach, the three had plans for the first-ever conference on positive psychology, to be held in Akumal a year later — it was to become an annual event — and a strategy for recruiting young talent to the nascent field.
Within a few months, Seligman, who has a talent for popularizing and promoting his areas of interest, was approached by the Templeton Foundation in England, which proceeded to create lucrative awards for research in positive psych. The result: an explosion of research on happiness, optimism, positive emotions and healthy character traits. Seldom has an academic field been brought so quickly and deliberately to life. What Makes Us Happy So, what has science learned about what makes the human heart sing?
Take wealth, for instance, and all the delightful things that money can buy. Research by Diener, among others, has shown that once your basic needs are met, additional income does little to raise your sense of satisfaction with life. A good education? Sorry, Mom and Dad, neither education nor, for that matter, a high IQ paves the road to happiness. No, again.
In fact, older people are more consistently satisfied with their lives than the young. A complicated picture: married people are generally happier than singles, but that may be because they were happier to begin with. Sunny days? Nope, although a study showed that Midwesterners think folks living in balmy California are happier and that Californians incorrectly believe this about themselves too. A giant yes. Measuring Our Moods Of course, happiness is not a static state.
And even the bluest have their moments of joy. That has presented a challenge to social scientists trying to measure happiness. That, along with the simple fact that happiness is inherently subjective. To get around those challenges, researchers have devised several methods of assessment.
Diener has created one of the most basic and widely used tools, the Satisfaction with Life Scale. Though some scholars have questioned the validity of this simple, five-question survey, Diener has found that it squares well with other measures of happiness, such as impressions from friends and family, expression of positive emotion and low incidence of depression. Researchers have devised other tools to look at more transient moods.
Csikszentmihalyi pioneered a method of using beepers and, later, handheld computers to contact subjects at random intervals. A pop-up screen presents an array of questions: What are you doing?
How much are you enjoying it? Are you alone or interacting with someone else? The method, called experience sampling, is costly, intrusive and time consuming, but it provides an excellent picture of satisfaction and engagement at a specific time during a specific activity.
Just last month, a team led by Nobel Prize—winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman of Princeton University unveiled a new tool for sizing up happiness: the day-reconstruction method. Participants fill out a long diary and questionnaire detailing everything they did on the previous day and whom they were with at the time and rating a range of feelings during each episode happy, impatient, depressed, worried, tired, etc. The method was tested on a group of women in Texas with some surprising results.
It turned out that the five most positive activities for these women were in descending order sex, socializing, relaxing, praying or meditating, and eating. Exercising and watching TV were not far behind. That may seem surprising, given that people frequently cite their children as their biggest source of delight — which was a finding of a TIME poll on happiness conducted last month. The kids were such a pain! The two are very different, and studies show they do not correlate well.
Our overall happiness is not merely the sum of our happy moments minus the sum of our angry or sad ones. This is true whether you are looking at how satisfied you are with your life in general or with something more specific, such as your kids, your car, your job or your vacation. Kahneman likes to distinguish between the experiencing self and the remembering self. His studies show that what you remember of an experience is particularly influenced by the emotional high and low points and by how it ends.
So, if you were to randomly beep someone on vacation in Italy, you might catch that person waiting furiously for a slow-moving waiter to take an order or grousing about the high cost of the pottery. The power of endings has been demonstrated in some remarkable experiments by Kahneman.
One such study involved people undergoing a colonoscopy, an uncomfortable procedure in which a flexible scope is moved through the colon. While a control group had the standard procedure, half the subjects endured an extra 60 seconds during which the scope was held stationary; movement of the scope is typically the source of the discomfort.
It turned out that members of the group that had the somewhat longer procedure with a benign ending found it less unpleasant than the control group, and they were more willing to have a repeat colonoscopy.
Seligman, in contrast, puts the emphasis on the remembering self. For him, studying moment-to-moment experiences puts too much emphasis on transient pleasures and displeasures. Happiness goes deeper than that, he argues in his book Authentic Happiness.
It turns out that engagement and meaning are much more important. Can We Get Happier? One of the biggest issues in happiness research is the question of how much our happiness is under our control. Lykken, now 76, gathered information on 4, sets of twins born in Minnesota from through After comparing happiness data on identical vs.
Genes influence such traits as having a sunny, easygoing personality; dealing well with stress; and feeling low levels of anxiety and depression. At Carnegie Mellon, for instance, psychologist Sheldon Cohen has been exploring exactly how positive emotions affect the body.
This is the flip side of previous work by Cohen and others linking stress, Type-A behavior and negative emotions to lowered immunity, heart disease and shorter lifespan. Cohen's research shows that people with a "positive emotional style" have better immunity to cold and influenza viruses when exposed in the lab. His most recent work, presented at the conference, suggests that this is mainly due to the release of optimal levels of cytokines, proteins that regulate the immune response.
Cohen and his colleagues have also been studying how social relationships and positive emotions can impact lifespan. Their work builds on a famous University of Kentucky study of aging nuns, which found that the more positive emotions the nuns had expressed in brief autobiographies written 60 years earlier at age 22, the longer they lived. Once again, there was a correlation between longevity and positive emotions, but in the newer study the relationship held only for "active" expressions of emotion, such as "excited," "thrilled" and "delighted" as opposed to passive emotions like "pleased" and "calm.
Studies like Cohen's help ground a young and sometimes fluffy field in hard science, says conference chairman Chris Peterson of the University of Michigan. That temptation was addressed head-on in a keynote speech by Ed Diener, president of the International Positive Psychology Association.
Diener pointed out that some of the most popular findings on happiness have not held up to further study, that researchers have begun to the record straight.
One such study had found that people who win lotteries are no more satisfied with their lives after winning than before. Another purported to show that people who became paraplegics were able to return to their previous level of happiness within a few years after their disabling accident.
Happiness" for his foundational work in the field and who holds the aptly named Smiley chair in psychology at the University of Illinois. Seligman has pioneered a number of well-publicized happiness-boosting exercises, for example: keeping a gratitude journal, jotting down three good things or "blessings" that occur each day, making a practice of doing "acts of kindness" for others, writing a letter of gratitude to a mentor.
But more recent research, particularly by Sonja Lyubomirsky at University of California, Riverside, indicates that some of these exercises can lose their power with too much repetition: "They become stale and stagnant," says Lyubomirsky.
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